Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market.
The geek sees an office suite.
The office manager sees one component of integrated - centrally managed - office system that scales well to an enterprise of any size.
In his opinion - the MS product is best-of-breed. Win 7 cut itself a 10% share of the global client in market in less than six months - and thaat in the arguably quite competitive consumer market.
If you'd get a normal tablet or computer, you wouldn't need to jailbreak it.
The iPad is a convenient and stylish mobile device. It sells in a market that values style and convenience in a mobile device. The jailbreak introduces uncertainties and complications that aren't needed or welcomed here.
Yeah, because a company that got and maintained its riches only because of its half-baked operating system and word processor is so much like a company that goes out on a limb (over and over again) to invent a new category of consumer device
Crack open a Mac and what you will find inside is a sub-set of the commodity hardware that has evolved in support of the mass-market Windows platform.
The mass market platform is the achievement of that "half-baked" OS.
The OS that runs well on hardware that is midline at the time of release and bargain basement a year or so later.
The news for April has Win 7 breaking 10% in the Net Applications stats and 20% in Ars Technica's stats. Mass market acceptance. Rock-solid geek cred.
The geek sees an office suite. The first-tier office suite, if he is honest. The office manager sees one component of an integrated office system that scales quite well to an enterprise of any size and type.
What choice has Apple - Apple Computer, long ago - but to compete in the high-risk, high-style, up-scale consumer tech market?
How on earth does a company like Apple seem to think they can steal someone's idea and get away with it?
You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea.
If Apple's controlller is significantly different - Apple wins because users rarely look beyond Apple and the Apple app store - and developers will follow their lead.
If the controllers are too much alike, Apple wins on the patent.
If Apple loses on the patent, it wins on mass production, shelf space, visibility, marketing - and price, if it chooses.
I'm sure there are some hoteliers that will be excited about reducing their staffing for for washing and folding all the towels and sheets they go through. Hospitals likely would love this too, since it wouldn't show up sick and help spread diseases on clean linens.
The machine that washes your dishes: does it look like the Jetson's robot maid Rossie?
The biggest mistake a venture capitalist can make - Mark Twain is the is classic example - is to back a machine that does the job the way a man or woman would do it.
With a U.S. patent and a sheaf of testimonials, Mrs. Cochrane turned to the invention of something as complex as any dishwasher: a company to market a new invention.
Because she wasn't adamant about what part of humanity she would bless with the dishwasher, Josephine Cochrane traveled to Chicago in about 1887 to make another start in salesmanship, targeting institutions and hotels. A rich friend advised her to try the manager of the Palmer House and then introduced her to him, with the result that she received an order, and a momentous one at that. The manager may have been easily sold in deference to Mrs. Cochrane's rich friend, a resident of the hotel, but nonetheless the Palmer House was the most famous hotel in the country, and some of its reputation immediately began to spill over to the Garis-Cochran. The same friend next told her to try the Sherman House, another big hotel in the city. That would have to be a "cold" sale, though, with no cozy introduction. She went to the hotel by herself and sat down in the ladies' parlor, just off the lobby, submitting a request for a moment of the manager's time. It was granted.
"You asked me what was the hardest part of getting into business," Mrs. Cochrane recalled for the reporter for the Record-Herald. "That was almost the hardest thing I ever did, I think, crossing the great lobby of the Sherman House alone. You cannot imagine what it was like in those days, twenty-five years ago, for a woman to cross a hotel lobby alone. I had never been anywhere without my husband or father --the lobby seemed a mile wide. I thought I should faint at every step, but I didn't--and I got an $800 order as my reward."
By 1888 the company was offering two basic models, each of which could be designed in a variety of sizes. In the smaller, hand-operated one, the dish rack was placed in a box-shaped canister and hot soapy water was sprayed over it by means of hand-pumping. Afterward, hot rinsing water had to be hand-poured over the dishes. The second version was larger and more involved mechanically. It had dish racks on either side that moved back and forth under a stream of soapy water. The beauty of the mechanical assembly designed by Mrs. Cochrane was that it allowed someone other than a stevedore to operate it, as it moved crates of heavy dishes even while pumping water straight up from the bottom. The initial idea was that even the slightest maid or housewife would be able to operate the machine. It was designed to be fitted with a motor, which was sold separately. At peak capacity a Garis-Cochran could wash and dry 240 dishes in two minutes. The Woman Who Invented the Dishwasher
"Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth Amendment, and often we have to reclaim the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives [the authorities] powers that were not envisioned by the Founding Fathers."
The border crossing - the military check point - has never been a good place to assert your rights to anything.
Least of all to an immunity from search and seizure.
There may be a Silver Lining to this. Depending on how its used, with such a large dataset it may give us an idea of how inaccurate/accurate fingerprint identification is.
Fingerprints are evidence.
The pieces have to fit together.
Not perfectly, but well enough to be persuasive.
When there is a murder is in Roanoke, the killer is mostly likely to be found close by in Virginia. He won't be the 54 year old engineer overseeing a public works project in Iraq or the eighty-seven year old priest in a Dallas hospice.
In India, there's no Right to Privacy as strongly guaranteed under the US Constitution.
There is no such explicit right to privacy in the American Constitution:
The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." The meaning of the Ninth Amendment is elusive, but some persons (including Justice Goldberg in his Griswold concurrence) have interpreted the Ninth Amendment as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
The question of whether the Constitution protects privacy in ways not expressly provided in the Bill of Rights is controversial. Many originalists, including most famously Judge Robert Bork in his ill-fated Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have argued that no such general right of privacy exists. The Supreme Court, however, beginning as early as 1923 and continuing through its recent decisions, has broadly read the "liberty" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee a fairly broad right of privacy that has come to encompass decisions about child rearing, procreation, marriage, and termination of medical treatment. Polls show most Americans support this broader reading of the Constitution.The Right of Privacy
It is a list of things the Government MUST do and MUST NOT do, and with respect to that government, the Constitution is indeed in the form of "all things not compulsory are forbidden".
That probably takes the argument too far.
The Constitution got a pretty through working-over after the Civil War - a permanent alteration in the balance of power between the state and federal governments - and there remains the problem of definition and interpretation.
The way people think - the way people talk - changes over 200 years.
Filesharing will go on, it will just be a little bit more underground and not so open as it is today
The underground is chill, damp, slow and lonely. You are marginalized in a space you share with the perverts and wackos. When you come up for air you are tainted by the smell of the sewers.
The studios don't need to kill P2P - they only need strip away its veneer of convenience, respectablity and safety.
The geek seems quite capable of doing that job for them.
I mean, you use the site to search for the desired torrent, and then click to download the.torrent file - it would be easy to host the.torrent files on a separate server, seperate site, or by a separate company altogether. Would this get around the ruling?
"Piercing the corporate veil" - establishing the connections between A, B and C - is well worth the effort for the payoff it delivers in court.
The prosecutor has all the elements of a criminal conspiracy in his hand.
The felony charge. Hard time.
He'll expose a card or two to your partners in the game - and they will cut a deal and sell you out.
This is no longer true; & the other reason - funding the creation of great media - obviously does not create enough value to justify the business that many of these companies continue to sue to protect.
Which is another way of saying the downloader is systematically destroying a part of our common cultural heritage.
2008 was particularly rich in films with impeccable geek cred. The Dark Knight. Iron Man. Wall-E. Production budgets $200 million each. Distribution costs - far from negligible if you want the full theatrical experience.
Pixar has the option of shifting production wholly to safe and profitable family-oriented sequels to Toy Story, Cars, and Monsters, Inc.
Nothing more the like of Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Wall-E or Up.
I'm still unclear on the business benefit to the MPAA companies that comes from suing their customer base.
The studio's customer base - by definition - buys theater tickets, DVD or Blu Ray disks. Rents from Blockbuster or Netflix. Subscribes to HBO and PPV. Watches add supported videos.
The paying customer dictates what sort of film can be produced and how much money can safely be borrowed to fund it. The downloader has no say in any of this.
Here in the US, we don't have democracy now. We have a two party, democratic REPUBLIC. The politicians can pretty much do whatever they want after they have been elected because the media has conditioned us to believe that we have only two parties from which to choose (i.e. - "bipartisan").
The two party system in the states has its beginnings in the divide between mercantile Hamilton and the agrarian Jefferson in Washington's first Administration.
"Party discipline" doesn't exist in the states as any European or Canadian would understand it.
The major parties are loosely bound coalitions based on issues, geography, personalities and so on. But a loosely bound coalition can be remarkably enduring and effective.
The third party in the states forms around a single issue or set of issues and a lone charismatic leader - when one or the other are extinguished, the party dies as well.
In American culture, three is the unlucky number. The also-ran.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong. For example, homosexuality, coveting and envy, pride, "thoughtcrime" in the novel, 1984, etc.
I don't think it would be difficult to prove that being driven by greed, pride and envy can have very dangerous consequences in the real world. That is, at least, the argument made here in every other post about Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Just because it's a movie doesn't mean the MPAA owns it.
The MPAA is a trade association. It doesn't "own" anything." Members are drawn form the "big six" studios"
20th Century Fox Walt Disney Sony Pictures Paramount (Viacom) Universal Warner
But you'll most likely discover the independent studio has signed on to the MPAA's rating and title registration services. You can't copyright a title, but you can protect it by contract.
Slashdot Mirror
How had he never heard of War of the Worlds? I mean it's a cultural thing at this point
Your culture. Not his.
Are we really that desperate to continue using closed software.
That decision will be made by the user. For whom the program is always more than the code.
Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market.
The geek sees an office suite.
The office manager sees one component of integrated - centrally managed - office system that scales well to an enterprise of any size.
In his opinion - the MS product is best-of-breed.
Win 7 cut itself a 10% share of the global client in market in less than six months - and thaat in the arguably quite competitive consumer market.
If you'd get a normal tablet or computer, you wouldn't need to jailbreak it.
The iPad is a convenient and stylish mobile device. It sells in a market that values style and convenience in a mobile device. The jailbreak introduces uncertainties and complications that aren't needed or welcomed here.
Yeah, because a company that got and maintained its riches only because of its half-baked operating system and word processor is so much like a company that goes out on a limb (over and over again) to invent a new category of consumer device
Crack open a Mac and what you will find inside is a sub-set of the commodity hardware that has evolved in support of the mass-market Windows platform.
The mass market platform is the achievement of that "half-baked" OS.
The OS that runs well on hardware that is midline at the time of release and bargain basement a year or so later.
The news for April has Win 7 breaking 10% in the Net Applications stats and 20% in Ars Technica's stats. Mass market acceptance. Rock-solid geek cred.
The geek sees an office suite. The first-tier office suite, if he is honest. The office manager sees one component of an integrated office system that scales quite well to an enterprise of any size and type.
What choice has Apple - Apple Computer, long ago - but to compete in the high-risk, high-style, up-scale consumer tech market?
Why is anyone patenting the idea of docking some controls to an iphone?
seriously - how is this non-obvious.
That is the wrong question to ask.
The right question to ask is whether your peripherial device stands a chance of success in the iPhone market.
Think product. Not patent.
Style, comfort, materials and workmanship? Elusive. Expensive. Eve vs Wall-E.
Shelf space in the Galleria Mall?
Hardware and software compatibility? That will survive the next firmware upgrade - and the one after that?
How on earth does a company like Apple seem to think they can steal someone's idea and get away with it?
You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea.
If Apple's controlller is significantly different - Apple wins because users rarely look beyond Apple and the Apple app store - and developers will follow their lead.
If the controllers are too much alike, Apple wins on the patent.
If Apple loses on the patent, it wins on mass production, shelf space, visibility, marketing - and price, if it chooses.
I'm sure there are some hoteliers that will be excited about reducing their staffing for for washing and folding all the towels and sheets they go through. Hospitals likely would love this too, since it wouldn't show up sick and help spread diseases on clean linens.
The machine that washes your dishes: does it look like the Jetson's robot maid Rossie?
The biggest mistake a venture capitalist can make - Mark Twain is the is classic example - is to back a machine that does the job the way a man or woman would do it.
With a U.S. patent and a sheaf of testimonials, Mrs. Cochrane turned to the invention of something as complex as any dishwasher: a company to market a new invention.
Because she wasn't adamant about what part of humanity she would bless with the dishwasher, Josephine Cochrane traveled to Chicago in about 1887 to make another start in salesmanship, targeting institutions and hotels. A rich friend advised her to try the manager of the Palmer House and then introduced her to him, with the result that she received an order, and a momentous one at that. The manager may have been easily sold in deference to Mrs. Cochrane's rich friend, a resident of the hotel, but nonetheless the Palmer House was the most famous hotel in the country, and some of its reputation immediately began to spill over to the Garis-Cochran. The same friend next told her to try the Sherman House, another big hotel in the city. That would have to be a "cold" sale, though, with no cozy introduction. She went to the hotel by herself and sat down in the ladies' parlor, just off the lobby, submitting a request for a moment of the manager's time. It was granted.
"You asked me what was the hardest part of getting into business," Mrs. Cochrane recalled for the reporter for the Record-Herald. "That was almost the hardest thing I ever did, I think, crossing the great lobby of the Sherman House alone. You cannot imagine what it was like in those days, twenty-five years ago, for a woman to cross a hotel lobby alone. I had never been anywhere without my husband or father --the lobby seemed a mile wide. I thought I should faint at every step, but I didn't--and I got an $800 order as my reward."
By 1888 the company was offering two basic models, each of which could be designed in a variety of sizes. In the smaller, hand-operated one, the dish rack was placed in a box-shaped canister and hot soapy water was sprayed over it by means of hand-pumping. Afterward, hot rinsing water had to be hand-poured over the dishes. The second version was larger and more involved mechanically. It had dish racks on either side that moved back and forth under a stream of soapy water. The beauty of the mechanical assembly designed by Mrs. Cochrane was that it allowed someone other than a stevedore to operate it, as it moved crates of heavy dishes even while pumping water straight up from the bottom. The initial idea was that even the slightest maid or housewife would be able to operate the machine. It was designed to be fitted with a motor, which was sold separately. At peak capacity a Garis-Cochran could wash and dry 240 dishes in two minutes. The Woman Who Invented the Dishwasher
You don't provide proof that you broke into a private house.
Then you can't risk breaking into the house to download the porn.
You might be seen. You might be caught. Trip an alarm. Be confronted by his wife. His kids. His housekeeper. There is so much that can go wrong.
It's no surprise really when you make your departure in a body bag.
The geek as criminial is playing out of his league. Too clever by half. Arrogant as hell. Reckless beyond belief.
"Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth Amendment, and often we have to reclaim the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives [the authorities] powers that were not envisioned by the Founding Fathers."
The border crossing - the military check point - has never been a good place to assert your rights to anything.
Least of all to an immunity from search and seizure.
There may be a Silver Lining to this. Depending on how its used, with such a large dataset it may give us an idea of how inaccurate/accurate fingerprint identification is.
Fingerprints are evidence.
The pieces have to fit together.
Not perfectly, but well enough to be persuasive.
When there is a murder is in Roanoke, the killer is mostly likely to be found close by in Virginia. He won't be the 54 year old engineer overseeing a public works project in Iraq or the eighty-seven year old priest in a Dallas hospice.
In India, there's no Right to Privacy as strongly guaranteed under the US Constitution.
There is no such explicit right to privacy in the American Constitution:
The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." The meaning of the Ninth Amendment is elusive, but some persons (including Justice Goldberg in his Griswold concurrence) have interpreted the Ninth Amendment as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
The question of whether the Constitution protects privacy in ways not expressly provided in the Bill of Rights is controversial. Many originalists, including most famously Judge Robert Bork in his ill-fated Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have argued that no such general right of privacy exists. The Supreme Court, however, beginning as early as 1923 and continuing through its recent decisions, has broadly read the "liberty" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee a fairly broad right of privacy that has come to encompass decisions about child rearing, procreation, marriage, and termination of medical treatment. Polls show most Americans support this broader reading of the Constitution. The Right of Privacy
It is a list of things the Government MUST do and MUST NOT do, and with respect to that government, the Constitution is indeed in the form of "all things not compulsory are forbidden".
That probably takes the argument too far.
The Constitution got a pretty through working-over after the Civil War - a permanent alteration in the balance of power between the state and federal governments - and there remains the problem of definition and interpretation.
The way people think - the way people talk - changes over 200 years.
and your proof for this is to be found - where?
If I do work today I don't continue getting paid for it 70 years after I'm dead... why should you?
You aren't being paid - your estate is being paid.
You do have an estate plan?
I am betting that if you do, it a mix of real and intangible property that cannot be casually stripped away from your heirs.
Filesharing will go on, it will just be a little bit more underground and not so open as it is today
The underground is chill, damp, slow and lonely. You are marginalized in a space you share with the perverts and wackos. When you come up for air you are tainted by the smell of the sewers.
The studios don't need to kill P2P - they only need strip away its veneer of convenience, respectablity and safety.
The geek seems quite capable of doing that job for them.
I mean, you use the site to search for the desired torrent, and then click to download the .torrent file - it would be easy to host the .torrent files on a separate server, seperate site, or by a separate company altogether.
Would this get around the ruling?
"Piercing the corporate veil" - establishing the connections between A, B and C - is well worth the effort for the payoff it delivers in court.
The prosecutor has all the elements of a criminal conspiracy in his hand.
The felony charge. Hard time.
He'll expose a card or two to your partners in the game - and they will cut a deal and sell you out.
Ya know... The folks that made it popular in the first place.
Good god.
Is the geek really this swell-headed?
The PS3 was a strong, competitive, entry in the console game sweepstakes. It was and remains an equally credible, Internet enabled, Blu-Ray player.
That is what sold the product.
This is no longer true; & the other reason - funding the creation of great media - obviously does not create enough value to justify the business that many of these companies continue to sue to protect.
Which is another way of saying the downloader is systematically destroying a part of our common cultural heritage.
2008 was particularly rich in films with impeccable geek cred. The Dark Knight. Iron Man. Wall-E. Production budgets $200 million each. Distribution costs - far from negligible if you want the full theatrical experience.
Pixar has the option of shifting production wholly to safe and profitable family-oriented sequels to Toy Story, Cars, and Monsters, Inc.
Nothing more the like of Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Wall-E or Up.
I'm still unclear on the business benefit to the MPAA companies that comes from suing their customer base.
The studio's customer base - by definition - buys theater tickets, DVD or Blu Ray disks. Rents from Blockbuster or Netflix. Subscribes to HBO and PPV. Watches add supported videos.
The paying customer dictates what sort of film can be produced and how much money can safely be borrowed to fund it. The downloader has no say in any of this.
Here in the US, we don't have democracy now. We have a two party, democratic REPUBLIC. The politicians can pretty much do whatever they want after they have been elected because the media has conditioned us to believe that we have only two parties from which to choose (i.e. - "bipartisan").
The two party system in the states has its beginnings in the divide between mercantile Hamilton and the agrarian Jefferson in Washington's first Administration.
"Party discipline" doesn't exist in the states as any European or Canadian would understand it.
The major parties are loosely bound coalitions based on issues, geography, personalities and so on. But a loosely bound coalition can be remarkably enduring and effective.
The third party in the states forms around a single issue or set of issues and a lone charismatic leader - when one or the other are extinguished, the party dies as well.
In American culture, three is the unlucky number. The also-ran.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong. For example, homosexuality, coveting and envy, pride, "thoughtcrime" in the novel, 1984, etc.
I don't think it would be difficult to prove that being driven by greed, pride and envy can have very dangerous consequences in the real world. That is, at least, the argument made here in every other post about Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Hopefully, the remuneration that the games programmers would receive would be encouragement to complete more projects.
You are still underestimating the time and resources needed to produce a professional quality mod:
Story and script. Art design, Level design, Characters, props, and animation. Special effects. Music. Dialog and vocal performance...
It won't be enough to simply re-cycle the existing game assets: putting your American officer in a Nazi uniform and calling it a day.
Any significant departure from the main story line and setting has a very significant price.
yeah you pay their cheques... and yeah, we can get cheques elsewhere
tell me why your new employer should trust you after you betrayed your old employer.
tell me why he keeps you around after he's pumped you dry of anything useful you could tell him.
tell me how you stop the word spreading around that you are high maintaince, high risk.
Just because it's a movie doesn't mean the MPAA owns it.
The MPAA is a trade association. It doesn't "own" anything." Members are drawn form the "big six" studios"
20th Century Fox
Walt Disney
Sony Pictures
Paramount (Viacom)
Universal
Warner
But you'll most likely discover the independent studio has signed on to the MPAA's rating and title registration services. You can't copyright a title, but you can protect it by contract.